The US Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcement's use of geofence warrants—broad requests for smartphone location data—requires privacy protections under the Fourth Amendment. The 6-3 decision in Chatrie v. US marks a significant victory for privacy advocates who view such warrants as an unconstitutional dragnet.
Majority Opinion and Key Holdings
Justice Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion, holding that the sensitive data collected by geofence warrants constitutes a Fourth Amendment search. The court affirmed that individuals have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their cell phone location records, even when in public areas. “An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information—even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company,” Kagan wrote.
The case, widely seen as a test of privacy rights in the digital era, involved Okello Chatrie, who was convicted of an armed bank robbery in Richmond, Virginia, after police used geofence warrants to obtain his location data from Google. Chatrie had opted into Google's location history feature, which recorded his location every few minutes. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Arguments and Dissent
Chatrie's lawyers argued that the geofence warrant was overly broad and violated his Fourth Amendment rights, which protect against unreasonable searches and seizures. The government countered that accessing only a short period of location data did not constitute a Fourth Amendment search. The majority rejected this argument, also dismissing the government's claim that generating location history was a voluntary choice. The justices noted that people do not choose to share private information with third parties “just by doing the ordinary thing cellphone users do.” They emphasized that Google often prompts users to enable location history, warning that devices may not “work correctly” otherwise, without disclosing how frequently or precisely data is recorded or how it might be shared with the government.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a concurring opinion, highlighted that even short-term monitoring can reveal intimate details about a person's life, such as visits to “the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, or the by-the-hour motel.”
Impact and Broader Implications
Privacy advocates have long criticized geofence warrants for their breadth. Matthew Tokson, a law professor at the University of Utah, noted that without a link to a specific crime, the government could monitor protests, abortion clinics, gun ranges, churches, AA meetings, or doctors' offices. The majority opinion noted that the court of appeals will determine whether the search in Chatrie's case was “reasonable,” meaning each step was properly described and supported by probable cause.
Law enforcement argues that geofence warrants are necessary to find suspects and witnesses when other leads are exhausted. The government has maintained that people cannot have a reasonable expectation of privacy when in public and when they have allowed third parties like Google to collect their location data. In its legal filings, the government noted that only about one-third of active Google account holders opted into location history, though Chatrie's lawyers pointed out that this still amounts to more than 500 million users. Even Google has acknowledged that geofence searches “often run a high risk of sweeping in innocent users—sometimes thousands of them,” covering private homes, government buildings, and places of worship.
Legal Significance
This ruling is the first time the Supreme Court has addressed the scope of the Fourth Amendment in relation to geofence warrants since a landmark 2018 decision that required a warrant for tracking cell phone location history. Paul Ohm, a law professor at Georgetown University, called the decision “a very good day for constitutional privacy,” adding that “the court reaffirmed that the police need a search warrant to turn private services like Google’s location tracking into a state surveillance tool.”
